


because he is trying to kill you (and you deserve it, you do, and you know this)

by Irrelevancy



Series: badly, I know, but I live [2]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Aftercare, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Blood and Violence, Bondage, Breathplay, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Cock Slapping, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Crying, Dysfunctional Relationships, Hair-pulling, Impact Play, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Object Insertion, Rape Roleplay, Regret, Rough Sex, Safewords, Self-Destruction, Talking To Dead People, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 09:01:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20794070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irrelevancy/pseuds/Irrelevancy
Summary: If Ace were alive, he would hate what Sabo was doing to Marco.Timeskip; it's about guilt. And punishment. And un-forgiveness. Second Chance's what-would-have-been. Now with asequel.





	because he is trying to kill you (and you deserve it, you do, and you know this)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [seduced you and left you bruised and ruined (you poor sad thing, you want a better story)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20754596) by [voxofthevoid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxofthevoid/pseuds/voxofthevoid). 

> ...I also have like, three other happy porn docs, but this is the one I finished first hahahahah. Title's also from Richard Siken, as in lineage with voxofthevoid's _amazing_ Stucky fic.
> 
> **Lots of content warnings** for this one. Basically, Marco and Sabo enter a BDSM relationship based in mutual guilt and blame. I've tagged all the warnings I can think of, but please do let me know if I've missed something. See endnotes for more details, esp about the dub-con tag.

If Ace were alive, he would hate what Sabo was doing to Marco. There was no doubt about that. But the flip side of that was that if Ace were alive, Sabo wouldn't be doing this. To anybody. Probably.

As a Revolutionary, Sabo's had to keep in mind many things regarding the notion of justice, and two of those things were _guilty act_ and _guilty mind_. In the determination of guilt, there was the harm done to be considered, and also the intention behind it. Accidents, it seemed widely believed, were less deserving of censure than acts of intention. In the process of justice, punishments were dealt out at magnitudes thought to match that of the crimes—there was an easy equivalence to draw then, in the case of a murder, between the severity of the sentence and the value of the life lost.

So; not meaning to kill him has actually made that person's life worth less.

As a Revolutionary, Sabo's also had to keep in mind a philosophy of blame. Blame the murderer or his circumstance? Well, why not both? When you didn't have the time however (and even with ten extra years, Sabo never seemed to have enough time to do what mattered), or didn't have the means, do you pursue righteousness against the individual offender or the entire system of harm? The answer of the Revolution was, of course, the system. There was no point pursuing individual pests when there was an entire nest. There was no point in a single stitch when the wound was the length of your back (and the depth of your chest).

The Revolution was about cleansing, treating, and wrapping the entire wound. They've done a solid job of that, with Sabo, by giving him a greater purpose and endless distracting things to do. But sometimes, there was still an itch—a singular point of prickling nerve endings, a particular craving—under all that bandaging. Sometimes, Sabo had to scratch it.

When he and Marco were in bed (or on the ground, or against the wall), Sabo often thought, with wry humor, that at first glance, Ace might get the situation entirely wrong. The too-late brother (with the guiltiest of minds, the one that dared to _forget_, to _abandon_) stripped down, often with his hands strapped together, straining uncomfortably above or behind him. The too-late brother with all his scars on display, hair pulled taut from his skull. The too-late brother screaming.

And then you have the _new_ brother—the indestructible one with talons and a glare as sharp as his bird-of-prey beak, the infallible one with the generous blue flames, the angry one who actually fought the War. The new brother usually had his fist in Sabo's hair, the flat of his other palm red itself from slapping—across Sabo's face, his ass, his inner thighs. (His _cock_ once, a four-fingered and unforgiving hit that had Sabo coming in an instant and actually whiting out. Sabo had loved it, but it had put Marco in such a state that even Sabo couldn't bring himself to ask for it again.)

_But_, Sabo imagined explaining to Ace, who would look on, his adult face stricken and alarmed, _it's not like that. I ask for it, see. I beg him to hurt me._

_Marco doesn't like to hurt anyone_, Ace might've replied warily. _How could you ask that of him?_

_How could I have imaginary conversations with you in my head, when I don't even know what your adult voice sounded like? _Sabo would counter. _We all do things we don't actually want to do, Ace_.

It started when Sabo sought Marco out (_guilty mind_). Marco couldn't have possibly gone looking for Sabo because Marco was too busy not knowing Sabo existed. Sabo didn't take it personally—Ace had never been the oversharing type about his family, after all.

(Luffy was another story. Luffy was good, and happy, and easy to place in the world. Luffy could let scars heal in peace, unlike Sabo who picked and picked until they were all bloodied up again.)

_At least,_ Sabo thought to Ace, _I didn't sleep with him under false pretenses. I didn't lie about my intentions or my relationship to you when I propositioned him. I didn't wait until the morning after, when he would surely be kind, to tell him he's just fucked the sworn brother of the man he's failed to protect. I didn't wait until then to see his expression._

_Sure sounds like you imagined it though._ Sabo's mental image of Ace always had something of a disgusted edge to his stare when he looked at Sabo. Sabo's only acknowledged it as a projection, because he knew the real Ace would be too kind to be that judgmental, and he wasn't about to do Ace such a disservice posthumously.

_Oh, I did. I imagined a lot of different ways I could hurt him before I set out to find him._

_Was that your goal then?_

_Punishment. Yes._

_Of whom?_

The answer was obvious, wasn't it? So obvious, he's never bothered telling it to his imaginary Ace. He's told it to Marco though.

(“I want you to punish me,” he hissed into Marco's mouth, fucking forward so that his cock caught on the rough edge of his trouser zippers, dragged against the rough fabric of Marco's pants. “You need to hurt me, and break me.”

“You—” It wasn't a tremble, but Marco's hands always _flinched_ before they tightened in Sabo's hair. Around Sabo's throat. Marco's voice, before he's steeled himself, always sounded _wrecked_, like he's gone and deep-throated tragedy. “Alright yoi. Whatever you need.”

“I want,” Sabo uttered, biting hard down on Marco's collarbone, “to _hurt_.”

_I want you to be the one who hurts me. I want your culpability._

“...Whatever you need, yoi.”)

Ace wasn't always around in Sabo's mind when they did this. It felt like an ineluctable betrayal. There was after all, something cleansing in the cool metal of what they were doing, something liberating in the slicing. The sex was great, first and foremost. Sabo's never come harder than he did with Marco's hand on him, Marco's cock in him (sometimes both Marco's hand _and_ cock in him). And the pain was satisfying. Marco hit just as hard as Sabo's ever asked him to (no harder). He fucked Sabo just as hard (sometimes harder).

The first time Sabo, lying sated in Marco's bed, realized what he was feeling could accurately be called _absolution_, he tried to kill Marco for real. The fight took them all the way out to the edge of the quaint little island Marco's been camping out on, huge trails of destruction dogging their footsteps. The fact that Marco was just going to replant every bush, redraw every trail that was lost to the destruction (for the villagers he now guarded over) only made Sabo want to _ruin_ more.

“You don't deserve forgiveness,” Sabo snarled at Marco, teeth painted with blood and fists full of bone and sand. Marco, visibly beaten himself, let his head fall back to the sky and just took it. “That's not what we're fucking _doing_ here, old man.”

“Punishment,” Marco answered through gritted teeth. “Yes yoi. I know. I fucking _know_.”

“Who the fuck do you think you _are_?” More fists. More swinging elbows. Marco loosed one in return, and Sabo didn't dodge, let the vivid red score across his cheek and the impact shake his mind. “I won't _ever_ forgive you.”

“Just like you won't ever forgive yourself,” Marco shot back, Sabo's favorite, toothiest version of him. This was the Marco that struck and struck and struck, until Sabo's broken skin and gone incoherent, then put Sabo's angry red flesh right against a rug or a wall. This was the Marco who would fuck him dry. But as always, this Marco was gone too soon, replaced by guilty eyes.

He tried to say, “Ace wouldn't want—”

Sabo buried a fist in his gut.

“Ace wouldn't want to be _dead_,” he said, because that was the truth. “He wouldn't have wanted you to lose the War.”

“If you want violence so damn bad yoi—” Marco's voice sounded still more strained with emotional than physical pain. “—fucking doing it yourself”

“No.”

When Sabo shoved Marco onto his back and straddled him, neither of them were hard. Sabo changed that, with the steady grind of his hips, ass still sore from their round before, Marco's obliging marks still scoring his skin.

“It's gotta be you,” he said. _I blame you._ “Marco-san, fuck me.” _If I can't put the blame on you too, I'd be left on my own._

So. Ace would hate this.

Ace would hate all the things he said meant to rile Marco up, stuff like,_ if this is all you've got I can see how you lost the War_, and, _maybe it'd help if you close your eyes and pretend I'm Ace._ He'd hate Sabo holding Marco to the oath swore at their very first meeting, rife with guilt; _you said you'd make it up to me no matter what_. He'd hate the litany of anger that spilled from Sabo's lips, whenever Marco finally got going: _harder, harder, fuck you, I hate you, I hate you, please, fuck me harder._

“You can send me away, you know,” Sabo said once, in a moment of Ace-induced lucidity, as Marco got out his first aid kit. There had been a slap hard enough to split Sabo's lip, and the messy, biting, vicious sex that followed only gouged the wound open more. Marco was readying sutures with steady hands and hollow eyes. “I'll stay away if you actually want me to.”

“Oh now you're giving me an out?” Marco's chuckle was just as hollow, and Sabo felt equal amounts of guilt and vindication. Marco tilted his head up with a gentle touch on the chin. “I thought this was the punishment yoi.”

“It is.” _Guilty act for guilty act,_ Sabo thought. “But seriously Marco-san, if you don't send me away now, I'm gonna start thinking you want it as bad as I do.”

“I'm hardly the victim here.” Marco sighed, a sound that was anguished down to his bones. “I _do_ want it, yoi. You know that as well as I do.” _That's part of the punishment._ “But if you walk away—well, that'd be nice, wouldn't it? To begin to forgive yourself?”

“How can I forgive myself,” Sabo snorted, “when you can't even forgive me?”

“Then give me a word yoi,” Marco snarled. At once, he also pressed an empty glass phial into Sabo's hand, something that, once dropped, would shatter with a loud, unretractable sound. “And I'll give us both exactly what we want.”

That night, Sabo screamed until he was hoarse. He yelled, he begged, he pleaded _stop, Marco, stop, please_, and then clammed right up when Marco asked him _what's the word, yoi?_ So then Marco would keep going. Rough, spreading fingers into oversensitive flesh. The sting of being stretched too quickly. A slap, flesh to flesh to blood. Being filled and tossed around like a rag doll. Whenever Marco pressed Sabo's face into the mattress or pillow, he would also very thoughtfully stretch Sabo's arm and hand (the one with the phial) over the edge of the bed. Sabo kept his grip and never dropped the damn thing, even when Marco pulled out, left him cold and gaping, then _spat_, like Sabo was some five-belli whore there just for him to get off in. As if _this_ was what Sabo deserved, spread and sprawled, wound flowing with blood again, being _used_.

When Marco stepped off the bed, he left Sabo's legs strapped wide to the edges of his headboard. Sabo had thought he was just taking a break. Then Sabo saw him pick up the length of pipe Sabo had brought with him and left in a corner. Saw Marco smack the pipe into the flesh of his palm. Saw Marco swing the pipe in one hand, eye Sabo's position on the bed, and _consider_.

Marco also made him cry that night. Not the tracks of tears triggered by instinct, but the full-body, full-lung sobs of a man in agony.

“Say it,” Marco urged, when the sobs escaped Sabo's mouth, helplessly heaving. Marco was also prying at Sabo's fingers, gone white around the vial. “Say _fire_.”

“Not yet,” Sabo wept. “Not yet.”

“_Dammit_ Sabo, I'm putting a stop to—”

“_Please._” This wasn't the pleading of a vicious Sabo eager to cast Marco as the aggressor. This wasn't the pleading of a Sabo who's been put under, thickly mired in his own masochism. This was the pleading of a man at the verge of a breakthrough, and he just need to be _broken through_, just a bit more, in order to reach the light. “_Marco, Marco please._”

Marco, with a noise like he was gritting back a sob of his own, lined the pipe up to reddened flesh, and _pushed_.

Sabo came back to himself in bits and pieces. He'd been loosened from all restraints and wrapped in a blanket. Whenever he inhaled, breath still came out hitched and wet.

He made a small, croaking sound of lucidity, and immediately, there was a gentle hand lifting the back of his head and a glass of water at his lips. He drank. Kept his eyes shut.

“Can you speak yoi?”

Shook his head. The same hand smoothed over his hair, applying comforting weight in its quiet petting down Sabo's shoulder, arm, chest.

“Can I heal your lip?”

Nodded. Marco's flames felt close enough to the real thing to make Sabo's mind buzz, but he kept it small and quick enough that Sabo never slipped into actual unease. The pain disappeared like the death of an old friend, raw and disconcerting. Marco's thumb touched where the wound had just been. Still gentle.

This was an aberrant deviation from their usual process, and Sabo knew he had to leave. That was part of the ritual, part of the punishment, to leave Marco with his wounds intact. (Such was his lot in life—always leaving, with nothing but ashes in his wake.) (Marco the Phoenix was reborn out of ash, but Sabo was here to make sure he always burned to bits first.) But _that—_the violence, the desecration—had done something unmooring. Sabo's will in its entirety had been strapped up, suspended, and shut completely away, all at Sabo's own behest.

“We can't do this anymore yoi,” Marco said, once Sabo has forced his legs to start moving again.

“Do you finally feel like you've paid your dues?” Sabo surmised, a bitter chuckle parting his lips. To his vague surprise, Marco's grip on him tightened.

“We need—” Tragedy can be so damn intimate, the way it saturated Marco's eyelashes and the scant inches of space between their breaths. “—to _heal_.”

“You'd know all about that, wouldn't you?”

“One of us has got to, yoi.”

Sabo gritted his teeth, chest and back bare with all his scars on display. Marco sat beside him in equal bareness, his ink as good as scars in the way it bore such wounding memories.

“Do you suppose you're carrying on Ace's will by sending me away? 'Giving me a chance to heal?' I already told you, _this_ is what I need. Justice and a trial by fire. If you've ever truly loved Ace, you'd keep me company.”

“You're wrong, you know.” Marco's gaze shifted off to the side, into a dark corner of the room. All of a sudden, Sabo realized how the refractions of character here worked, how from this angle, he and Marco were almost perfectly superimposed onto one another.

_What do you say to him?_ Sabo asked of Ace.

_What you never let me say to you_, Ace replied, gazing sadly at the lonely slump of Marco's back. _That it's not your fault_.

_Does he listen?_

_Neither of you hear my voice in order to _listen_ to me._ A wry smile, a cock of the head. _But he's better at catching the whispers than you._

“You're wrong,” Marco repeated, voice strengthened when he turned his attention back to Sabo, having surely just had his own conversation with his own imaginary Ace. The difference between the marks on their bodies, Sabo thought, was that Marco put his ink on himself, whereas Sabo just burned and burned until his lungs learned to breathe ashes. “I have forgiven you. And this only works if we both think we deserve it yoi.”

“I _forgot_ him,” Sabo snarled, fingers gouging into his thighs. “I left him to die.”

“And I was right there,” Marco replied, nail beds pressed just as white, “and I still let him die.”

“I wish—”

_I wish it had been me._

“—me too, yoi.”

_I wish it had been you_.

“Ace's _life_,” came out strained with so much agony, “was _important_. I won't let it be forgotten. Not again. I can't, I have to _keep_ him this time—”

“And I can give that to you,” Marco answered, voice low and urgent. “Whenever you need yoi. Mark him on your skin, tie you down and keep you here _with_ him. Fine. But after that, we also need—_I_ also need to, to stop the hurting.”

_Coward_, every inch of Sabo wanted to howl.

_One of you certain is_, Ace snapped back, expression severe. _Hear him. _Answer_ him._

“I've,” Sabo said, in guilty comprehension, “hurt you, haven't I?”

Marco laughed, because he was still trying to soothe and pet, as if Sabo were still injured.

_Aren't you?_

“I thought that was the point yoi.”

“Yeah but this time, I didn't mean to.” With the barest tip of his knuckle, Sabo stroked down the spine of Marco's tattoo. Marco's chest froze mid-breath. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have forced you to keep going.”

“You didn't—”

“I did,” Sabo said plainly. Then he huffed, “I thought the apology usually came before the forgiveness.”

“I still forgive you,” Marco whispered kindly. With a vivid, dangerous hand, he slowly touched Sabo's cheek, the flesh right under the scar. It was a hundred times worse than being struck. If Sabo had been broken by Marco's hands (and that goddamn pipe) just some time earlier, this was Sabo threatening to heal by them again. This was Sabo, ever used to being housed in flames, now being beckoned from scarring red to restorative blue.

This was Marco asking Sabo to stay.

Sabo didn't move.

“I can't forgive,” he said. _You or me or anybody else._ “I won't let him go.”

“Neither will I yoi,” was Marco's steady reply. “I'll do right by his will, Sabo, and Ace died to protect his brother.”

It's not like things miraculously got better, or healthier, after that. Not immediately. Two brothers of Ace, Sabo mused, with matching ideas of where the blame laid and opposite ideas of how to punish themselves for it. Or maybe it was the other way around—opposite ideas of where the blame was and matching punishments.

(“Do you enjoy it? Be honest,” Sabo would ask, one day in their future. They were still tentatively exploring the depths of intimacy together, the simple press of skin together after the pain-pleasure and the orgasms and more of the pain-pleasure.

“I'd wondered, at first,” Marco confessed, idly tracing swirls onto Sabo's shoulder. “It felt way too good to be entirely motivated by guilt—but maybe it was the guilt that was so intoxicating yoi. Indulging what my family's called my _martyr complex_, I guess. I could be the lightning rod for your anger, I could take the guilt that came from hitting you, I could do it because you asked me to yoi. An entirely self-serving selflessness.”

“...So yes, you do enjoy it,” Sabo deadpanned. Light touch turned to a playful pinch on his chin, turning his head until he could meet Marco's dark gaze over his shoulder, the flash of teeth.

“Putting all those marks on your skin and you only begging for more? Yes yoi, I love every second of it.”)

They don't kiss. It couldn't even generously be called a line in the sand, more like just the gesture to the hint of a line in the sand—but nonetheless, the rule was set. And kept.

_I don't understand_, Ace complained one night, as Sabo settled in for the evening. Sabo's gotten frighteningly used to this tiny, nondescript island Marco now called home. He's got his own slippers by the door, his side of the bed, his own drawers (full of impact instruments and sharp objects, but still). Ace was a specter that slipped in and out of focus, depending on the kind of day Sabo was having. _He obviously loves you, and I'm literally a manifestation of your subconscious, so I know you love him._

_What does that even mean for us, love?_ Sabo complained. Marco was already asleep (on his side of the bed), but something—not the stinging welts from the night, all of which Marco had already lovingly tended to, and weren't particularly serious anyways—kept Sabo up. Probably Ace, and his stupid logical feelings shit.

_It means nice things, doesn't it? Fight for each other and all that._

_I fought for you. I died for you. Didn't work out so well, did it?_

_Well maybe I'm not a great point of reference, idiot._

_But you are_. Ever since this whole “healing” shit started with Marco, Sabo's found himself more inclined toward moroseness. He had accused Marco of making him sadder, but Marco just said there wasn't a larger quantity of sadness, just a better awareness of it. Sabo called bullshit, because what the hell did Marco, hermit doctor of the high seas, know about emotional literacy. _You're the only point of reference, really._

_Sap_, Ace said fondly.

_I can't kiss him because I can't love him_, Sabo declared honestly. _I can't ever love him, not with you dead. Not with you still here in my ears and on my mind. You're on his too, I imagine. Our guilty minds match._

Sabo meant it. They never would kiss. Marco understood better than Sabo could ever get Ace to, in his mind.

But they _were_ healing, slowly, surely, etc. Sabo, in thinking about matters like blame and punishment, thought too about wounds. They mottled his skin, visible markers for his memory. They ensured that he would never, _never_ forget again. So he picked and picked and bloodied them right back up.

Marco, though, wore his wounds as ink. He hypothesized to Sabo something about _will_, something about _intention_. He said to Sabo words like, “You didn't mean to forget,” all while allowing Sabo the choice to deny himself absolution. He loosened Sabo's claws from flesh and offered to be the one to hurt Sabo instead. Gave him the wounds when the itch was there. Gave him the balm when they finished.

(“I was wrong,” Sabo whispered to the sleeping Marco, that night in bed. It was a cool evening with cicada song, cotton sheets, and gentle blue flames. “You do deserve forgiveness.”

_And I_, Ace said, just before Sabo dropped off into slumber as well, _would never hate you. Not for this. Not for healing._)

**Author's Note:**

> Sabo is a masochist, asks for and gets: rough sex, bondage, hair-pulling, spanking, face-slapping, cock-slapping, and double penetration of cock and fingers. There's a scene of rape role play, in which clear parameters are laid out for consensual non-consent. Sabo has both a safe word and a safe gesture, and is repeatedly reminded of them throughout the scene, though neither are used.
> 
> ***Dub-con elements** are on Marco's side in the same scene. Marco expresses clear distress at how far Sabo wants to take the scene, but continues at Sabo's urging. Sabo later apologizes.
> 
> This should be the least happy thing I write for this verse. Or does this count as the Second Chances verse if it's technically canon... or is it just an AU of my AU...
> 
> **12/12/19:** now with a sequel! Part 10 in this series, “Warm You with my Blood” (cw: fireplay).
> 
> Please leave a comment, or find me on [tumblr](http://touchmycoat.tumblr.com/)!


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